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I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.

David Graeber

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David Graeber
Age: 59 †
Born: 1961
Born: February 12
Died: 2020
Died: September 2
Anthropologist
Trade Unionist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
David Rolfe Graeber
David R. Graeber
World
Enjoy
Probably
Enjoying
Ends
Least
Improving
Work
Hurt
Caring
Good
Anyone
Acknowledge
Would
Word
Putting
Time
Friends
Spent
Insofar
Love
Poor
Aren
Industrious
Like
Family
Taking
Hurting

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You can't have cutthroat competition when there's no one stopping you from actually cutting each other's throats. In order to build up trust we also have to think about each other's needs and it creates an entirely different dynamic.
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Look at labor policy. What's the point of making everybody work too much? It's not very useful. It is destroying the planet, actually. But it's great at keeping people off the streets.
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What we're already doing is communism. The first step we have to make is to realize that we're already closer to it than we think.
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We don't live in a capitalist totality. Capitalism couldn't survive as a totality anyway. We live in this complex system and we already live communism and anarchism in a million forms everyday.
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As it turns out, we don't all have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.
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Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.
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There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.
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Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.
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Adam Smith actually took all his best ideas and lines from sources from medieval Persia. But one thing he doesn't take is the underlying assumption they have that the basis of a market is mutual aid.
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I think we need to think of capitalism as a very bad way of organizing communism. Much of what we do is already communism, so just expand it.
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We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
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Anarchism is surprisingly effective in solving actual problems largely because anarchists have thought a lot about solving actual problems on a micro level in ways that other political ideologies don't really feel they have to until after they seize state power.
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The example of Russia reminds us that keeping up that enormous dead weight of the security apparatus required to enforce the ideological conformity to preempt anything that looks like an alternative or a social movement is destroying capitalism.
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If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.
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States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.
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One of the fairly interesting things about money is that it makes certain things possible that wouldn't be possible otherwise - it doesn't make them inevitable. Hence the strange blindness of economists to what would actually happen when one does exchange things if there isn't money in such contexts.
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Capitalism is like this fractal thing where anything that contains an element of capitalism anywhere inside it is just something that turns into capitalism. It is an incredibly defeatist attitude. If you choose to look at reality that way, I suppose you can, but you have to do enormous violence to reality to do so consistently.
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Aristotle [would] probably conclude most Americans, for all intents and purposes, are slaves.
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Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.
David Graeber
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We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt.
David Graeber